


Vertigo From Falling

by girl_wonder



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:44:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girl_wonder/pseuds/girl_wonder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not a metaphor for falling. Dean wingfic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vertigo From Falling

At twenty-six, Dean opened up his arms and jumped off of the bridge.

He hoped, a second after he jumped, a flicker second of wind and colors passing and the inevitable pull of gravity, that Sam wasn't watching.

*****

Missouri is not the first psychic that Dean had ever met. He'd just learned how to hide it better after the first one.

The first one had been a middle aged guy who had braided feathers and dried flowers into his long thinning hair. Dean was positive that this guy had never actually met an Indian, just wanted to appear like he'd been to some pow-wows. In Dean's opinion, anyone who cooped native cultures without actually the reality of them was a couple werewolves short of a pack.

It didn't make Dean trust him a whole lot, so he wasn't surprised when Mr. I-Changed-My-Name-to-Dumbfuck-who-buys-online-peace-pipes turned out to be the host for a malevolent pixie.

Pixie extermination was pretty gruesome and involved a couple of things that Dean would happily never touch again, but it was a relatively short exorcism. Once they'd gotten rid of the pixie, the guy had taken one look in the mirror and shaved his head to military standard before asking them if they wanted a beer. Even though Dean's dad had been talking, the guy couldn't stop staring at Dean.

He'd cleared his throat, "It's just your..." The pause made Dean check his fly. "Aura."

"Well, I don't swing that way, but I don't like to judge," Dean had said. "Although, man, if you don't get your eyes off of it, I might have to punch you out."

"Where do you hide them?" The man had asked and looked at Dean, curious.

"Dean. Why don't you go buy us some cigarettes," John's voice had been an order, and Dean had stood without thinking twice.

He was already out the door and halfway to the store when he licked his lips and let himself think about all the secrets that the man could have seen in his aura. All the things he hid in places that _he_ didn't even want to think about.

Maybe they hadn't been what the man had seen in him. Maybe it had been that time he got in a bar fight and accidentally broke some guy's leg. Maybe the man had been talking about Dean's sins.

When he got back, though, it was to a tense kitchen and the man didn't even look at Dean, just took a cigarette and smoked it. In fits and starts, he had given them as much information on the nest as he remembered and waited until John had gone to the car before saying, "Angels don't have prettier ones, kid."

Dean had pretended not to hear him.

*****

Dean only knew that the human body falls at 9.8 meters per second squared because Sam studied for his AP tests and made Dean quiz him.

"9.8 meters per second squared?" Sam had been guessing, watching Dean's face for a give, a tell.

Of course, Dean was a much better card player than that. "Wrong, Sammy. The an object falls at a rate of... your momma!"

Sam had not thought that was funny.

Dean didn't think it was as funny either when he was accelerating at 9.8 meters per second and he might meet his momma soon. He wondered if, in the after life, she'd still be blonde. If he was bloodied from his fall, would she take the hem of his dress and wipe off the pieces of bone, brain. If her hem would stay stained red after.

In the stories of people who survived falls, they all said that it felt like flying. Dean would, at this point, argue. And not just because he was argumentative by nature. Falling felt like falling, the anticipation of impact, like playing chicken with a semi.

*****

The first time, the very, very fist time, Dean hadn't been a teenager. That would have made more sense, or at least it would according to the gospel of the X-men and Spiderman. He hadn't read a lot of them, but he'd read some. He'd watched a lot of the cartoons when they were on late night tv and in all the flashbacks they all got their powers when they were teenagers.

Like the Bat Mitzvah from Barnum and Bailey. Mazeltov, welcome to the world of freaks.

Dean'd been welcomed there a long time before he was a teen and so it was just weird that two months after Sam left on a Greyhound bus, Dean woke up thrashing on the bed, dark blood staining the sheets and only holding in a scream because he'd been trained to.

His father was already up and Dean would have been startled and reassured - Dad had never been good with nighttime terrors - except that his father was holding a gun in his right hand, even as his left ran soothingly down Dean's arm.

"Dad?" he asked, afraid and trying to still himself, but _they_ were quivering, too. He pushes himself up onto his hand and knees, loose feathers and down pushing up between his fingers. Looking at his father, he tried to keep eye contact. His dad couldn't shoot his own son. He couldn't.

This time, Dean's voice wavered and he didn't even mean it to. He was twenty-two and for the first time since he'd been holding a gun and watching something eat his brother, he was afraid.

"Dad?"

The sound of the gun being set on the nightstand was enough for him to sit up, try to get a hold of himself. If his dad didn't think it was something evil, it was ok.

He glanced over his shoulder at the mirror over the dresser. They were arched up, like he was about to take flight, bloody from where they'd ripped through his skin. In the mirror, he watched his father reach up to touch them and he saw them flutter the same moment he felt the muscles in his back move them.

Shuddering, he gripped his hands tighter around the handful of soft white, like the sharp feathers that would have been beaten out of a pillow during a pillow fight. The only thing that he'd ever used pillows for that wasn't sleeping was muffling the sound of a gunshot.

This was going to be something new to explain.

******

"Now," he said.

They never stopped hurting when they ripped like that, exploding to full length as muscle and bone shifted. At the right moment, they caught him and he arched up, momentum downward catching hard and that _hurt_ but not enough to stop him.

The girl screamed when he caught her.

*****

It was easy not to tell Sam about them. He'd call maybe once every few months, and the conversation always started with, "How's school?"

It usually ended with him saying angrily, "Look, Sammy, sometimes a question is just a _question_."

Long distance wasn't good for him. He was glad that Sam was off 'finding himself' or whatever Sam did that meant that he didn't need Dean anymore, but Dean had carried Sam in his arms, with his grubby little kid fingers wrapped tight around Dean's collar. Dean knew who Sam was, he'd be happy to find Sam if Sammy would only ask.

Sometimes he forgot that they were there because it had taken only a few hours for them to knit back into his body. At least that's what his dad had said that they'd done.

With the bones pressing tightly against him, it hadn't felt like knitting so much as melting, like someone poured warm water over his back and when he woke up, the fresh sheets were clean and white and the only thing left was the white feathers on his pillow.

That first night, his father had watched over him when he slept on his stomach, with them folded against his back.

Hearing the anger in Sam's voice, it hadn't felt right sharing the silence when he woke up after twenty four hours as an angel and found them gone, not even a scar, not even a trace except for the notes in Dad's journal, the feather taped onto the page. Before he'd handed the journal over to Sam that first time, he'd torn out that page, the one with his father's tilted letters and stuffed it into his pocket, flattening it out when he was alone.

Over time, the ink bled from being in his duffel bag with wet stolen hotel towels. He couldn't recognize what his father had written about him. By then he'd memorized it, though, so he didn't need to read it to know all the research his father had done about fallen angels and men with wings.

Biting nearly through his thick leather belt to get through a change, he thought that even if God had pushed him out of heaven, this shouldn't have been as painful as it was. So, he probably wasn't once one of the ones whispering in Pat Robertson's ear.

Angels were supposed to come down for really important purposes, to have fallen either because of sin or because they had been pushed out to help a human do something great. The best thing that Dean had ever done in his life was Sam, so he hoped that that was enough.

Men with wings were more rare, but at least he wasn't a harpie. Never had gotten the taste for blood.

Opening them always smelled brightly of copper and once, when he was cut up bad on a hunt, he had to reach back and check to make sure that the smell didn't mean that they were out, spread open to the night like protective shields arching above him.

With the windows open, driving sometimes felt like flying, air spinning inside the Impala drowning out the music, just him and the wind and the speed, greenery speeding by.

******

Sam asked the wrong questions. He asked, "how do you feel" and "why are you such an asshole" when the easier question to answer would have been, "why aren't you up there." He didn't know, of course, no one did with Dad gone, but even if he had, Dean didn't think that Sam would ask that.

The sky bloomed pale blue above them, nearly white and Dean would look at it sometimes, while he was driving. The roof blocked it, but he could see some in the side mirror where it met the road behind him.

He imagined what it would be like to play games with gravity, to catch himself at the last minute, a boy skipping stones on the water, except he was the stone and the water was that few inches above pavement.

The ache was so strong sometimes, that once, when he was on his own, before he'd had to go get Sam, before dad was on radio silence, he'd tried it.

The back road had been unvisited, still he'd driven halfway to an abandoned cabin before stopping the Impala and getting out. He'd bunched up his shirt and thrown it in the back with the rest of his laundry and thought about climbing a tree.

"Idiot," he told himself.

Instead, he climbed up the trunk of the Impala, stepped up onto her roof and spread out his arms under the bright sun. It was spring cold, but the light hit his skin and raised goosebumps.

When it hit, he screamed and almost fell down, catching himself at the last second and curling both arms around his stomach. Under his knees, the Impala's black roof was burning hot, but it was nothing compared to the ripping burn on his back. Then it was done, and he sighed, brought them in closer to check.

He pulled off a strip of skin caught on the edge of feathers. Without a thought they flipped up, spreading under the bright sun.

The rest of his body he didn't think about controlling, it just happened. He didn't think _shoot_ before his finger pulled the trigger. Vaguely, he wondered what would happen if he thought _fly_ and then before he'd even finished wondering they were beating, pulling him up.

Below him, he could see the dust spin, grass twist and wave and then he was above that and he was too high to think about anything but the wind on his face, the power in the muscles, the way his body knew what to do without his commands.

*****

He read up on some of the legends dad had pointed out in his notes.

Icarus with wings made of wax who soared too close to the sun and died because of it.

It was supposed to be a lesson about pride, and not having too much, about not flying too close to the sun.

Late at night, when he was alone and he could close his eyes and sit outside in the dark, feeling wind, he wondered if his dad wasn't trying to warn him. Up there, he was beyond his dad's reach, he was beyond anyone's reach.

Sam was all the way across the country and his wings hadn't melted yet.

Maybe his weren't made of wax, though. Whatever. Dean kept his flights short and never when he was on a hunt.

*****

Dean once was at a diner with world maps as place mats. The green and blue weren't the color of the real wold, the uniformity of location everywhere, same color grass making everything look that green from space.

Scratching at the edge of the Mojave Desert, or where it would be if it wasn't as green as the rainforest, Dean closed his eyes and pointed to somewhere.

Canada, at least he thought so, in this map without distinctions between desert and forest, US and Canada. He could walk out and leave the Impala parked where it was, leave his gear in the trunk for some car jacker to find, just _leave_.

If he walked out and just opened his wings and beat them hard, flying up, up, higher than he'd ever been, he could maybe find that patch of solid green, and just set down there. Go to sleep somewhere that the demon wouldn't think to look, a square of green earth that wasn't haunted.

Right there, on the ground, he could pull his wings over his head, the Lost Boys making a house around the sleeping Wendy-bird.

Sam came back from the bathroom and said, "Did you order yet?"

"Naw," Dean shook his head. "Couldn't without you."

The coffee mug fit over the whole country of Canada.

*****

The demon threw the little girl off of the bridge and Dean didn't even pause before leaping after her.

Back, safe, set gently on the sidewalk, she ran away from him, the only thing clear in her words was _monster_ , and Dean hunched over, shoulders tired. The muscles burned from having carried the extra weight.

The people who had seen it, seen what happened before, weren't pointing at the dead furry thing, they were pointing at _him_ and Sam was looking at him, eyes wide and mouth saying something.

Dean didn't wait to find out what it was.

He thought about the sky where sounds were muffled. Where words were muffled. When he looked down, they were too small to hurt him, even Sam, already running back to the Impala.

Up here felt like _freedom_ and he let the world move on without him. He wondered if maybe that's what Icarus had felt. Maybe he hadn't been prideful, he'd just been tired of being locked up, tired of pumping his wings because his dad said to.

Maybe he'd just liked the feel of the sun.

Eventually Dean landed, barefoot after dropping his shoes off somewhere south of the bridge because they were too much weight. Without a shirt, without shoes he knew that neither of them would be able to pretend about the day.

He unlocked the door with the key in his pocket.

Sam was still up, hands pressed together in the space between his knees, a world of weight on his back and when he looked up, Dean saw that he was nearly crying.

"Don't be such a girl," Dean's voice was soft as fine sandpaper on wood, dry from the workout and the wind. He closed the door with his foot and let them extend, fully.

"I didn't... I thought..."

"Jesus. I leave for a couple of hours and you think I've abandoned you like a kid at a mall?"

They folded in and Dean walked to the bathroom. Water and soap. He drank out of his hands, thirsty and when Sam came up behind him, they fluttered, nervously.

He made a face into his hands. He didn't think he'd have to teach his wings to play poker, but apparently they hadn't learned about tells.

Softly, Sam asked, "What's it like?"

Dean looked into the mirror over the sink, caught his brother's eyes and said, "It was like flying, you idiot."

*****

end


End file.
